Caste, Class, and Cultural Criticism in the Depression South (Fall 1990)

[I submitted this paper as part of the requirements a University of Florida grad student seminar in the Anthropology Department titled Culture & Community (ANT 6428) in the fall of 1990 taught by Allan Burns. I remember being rather annoyed at first with having to write this paper but being quite pleased with the result. I have often brought up in classes I have taught what I discovered in writing this paper, that a great novel can capture the essence of some time and place in a more powerful way than even an excellent social scientific or historical study.]

The social scientist and the novelist have regularly turned their respective talents to the analysis of society but rarely have their paths crossed. One deals in “fact” and the other in “fiction.” Nevertheless, they both have insights to offer the student of society of whatever persuasion. A comparative analysis of a social science monograph and a novel dealing with similar temporal or spatial contexts can create a much richer picture of society than either work alone.

This paper compares two such complementary works: John P. Dollard’s ethnography Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937) and Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). ¹ Both center on a small county seat town in the Lower South in the Depression 1930s. The rape of a white woman by a black man, whether imagined or real, provides a common central motif. Both books aim at a cultural critique of Southern race relations but advocate only gradual, careful change taking place within the strictures of southern society.

Although similar, the books inevitably differ as much as the respective authors: Dollard, a “Yankee” psychologist with the Institute of Human Relations at Yale coming down South to study “the color problem”; and Lee, an Alabama‑born and bred housewife writing the fictionalized reminiscences of her childhood. Dollard provides details on environment, education, politics, and religion that Lee never attempts. Dollard sees man and personality in Freudian terms constrained by inherited culture whereas Lee divides her world into good guys (mockingbirds) and bad guys (bluejays), reflecting a child’s outlook on the world. Dollard uses formal participant observation and informant interview techniques while Lee uses informal everyday observation and selective memory.

Despite their differences, the two authors draw quite complementary pictures of Southern society. Both Dollard and Lee see caste and class distinctions as “ways of dividing people according to the behavior expected of them in the society” (Dollard 62) reflecting the “common human passion for dominating other persons and having them behave in a desired manner” (Dollard 175), but each would divide the people up slightly differently. Dollard sees caste relations between Negroes and whites arising as a less secure but workable replacement for slavery after the Civil War when whites came together to combat the new black vote. Caste most clearly implies marriage prohibition but also entails economic, sexual, and prestige gains for the upper caste. Negroes had few rungs on their economic ladder and the vast majority had little more economic opportunity than the freedom to move from one white man’s fields to another’s. White males had free sexual access to black women but a black man who desired a white woman had a death wish. Deference demanded that Negroes refer to all whites as “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, or “Miss” while whites called Negroes by their first names or racial epithets like “nigger.”

Caste reduced Negroes to the state of permanent childhood, forever totally dependent on paternalist white benevolence. Socialized from birth in the superiority of “whiteness,” Negroes accepted their fate, apart from occasional instances of passive caste solidarity (such as non‑cooperation with the law). All forms of deference, although apparently given freely, in reality were backed by the full force of white aggression. Whites expected Negroes to resist as they themsleves believed they would resist if arbitrarily lowered to an inferior caste and thus whites severely overreacted to the slightest sign of Negro resistance. With white attitudes towards Negroes at odds with American egalitarian values, racism (with beliefs in the animal nature and racial inferiority of the lower caste) developed alongside the caste system in order to justify denying Negroes an equal share of the privileges of American society.

Dollard divides white society in a three‑class system‑‑poor, middle, and landed upper‑‑with the great majority of whites falling in the middle class. Genuine social mobility (most of the middle class rising out of the lower class rather than falling from the upper) kept underlying class antagonism from escalating into class conflict. Dollard assigns only a two‑class system for Negroes‑‑a great mass of poor and a thin “film” of middle. The smallness of the Negro middle class, composed of a handful professionals (ministers, teachers, etc.) reflected the very limited social mobility within the black caste.

Lee does not think of caste in terms of the color of one’s skin and in fact does not really give a name to the relations between blacks and whites. The blacks appear as a hopelessly monolithic blob apart from the few exceptional characters like Calpurnia, Tom, and Reverend Sykes. And the “other” life of even these Negroes down in the Negro Quarter remains a dark mystery. Yet Lee most likely would subscribe to Dollard’s description of black‑white relations. All the white characters except Atticus, the father, used “nigger” freely; Negroes were expected to go to the back door; Negro adults deferred to white children. Calpurnia, the black mammy who had been with the family since the parents got married, was considered part of the family yet could not be treated as company and had to sleep on a cot in the kitchen if she stayed over a night.

For Lee, caste refers strictly to whites, to the family (at one point she uses phrase “tribal group”) into which one is born. Forever family conscious, Southerners ascribed personal chracteristics to certain family traits or “streaks.” “[T]he older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time” (Lee 141). Lee’s concept has a strong historical element (when one’s family entered the county means everything), but also a lot of racial connotations because of the next‑to‑impossibility of escaping one’s caste, being ascribed at birth. ²

Whereas, for Lee, caste defines the overall system of interfamily relations, class provides general categories for labelling families. Maycomb County comes across, from a distinctly town point of view, as a society divided into middle‑class town folk and poor rural whites, with rural whites subdivided into “good” independent farmers (like the Cunninghams) and “bad” dependents on the county (like the Ewells). Dollard would place the Finches (the central family in the novel) as part of the paternalistic, landed upper class, those who feel responsible for and take care of “their” Negroes, whereas Lee would see the family entrenched firmly in the middle class. The “good” rural whites and townspeople together make up the “good folks,” the equivalent of Dollard’s middle class, but Lee shows strong antagonisms among these “good folks” based on urbanity, cleanliness, religion, etc. While they might be “good folks,” “foot‑washing” Baptists lambasting the town for its sinful ways (like growing flowers, listening to music, anything pleasurable, etc.), regularly antagonized townspeople. But still such Baptists were heads above the “bad” poor whites who lived like animals with no work ethic or prospects of a better life, living as guests of the county in good times or bad.

Both authors find a central key to the nature of caste and class relations in the notion of the rape of a white woman by a black man, what Dollard calls “the most intensely hostile act a Negro can perform within the purview of southern regional culture” (295), and here the books converge most strongly. Dollard deals with the issue symbolically (while acknowledging that such rapes actually do occur) while Lee presents the fictional trial of black Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping white Mayella Ewell. For Dollard, around the issue of rape and sexual access of black males to white females “centers quite visibly the whole caste problem; it is experienced as the most acute and agonizing of issues and one calling for the utmost in defense and aggression on the part of the white caste” (165). White policy is lynch now, ask questions later, although the upper class and certain more “civilized” middle-class whites can often keep such vigilantism in check, as Atticus (with the help of his children) does when the mob comes for Tom. But even if the suspected Negro escapes lynching, he can not escape the jury, and “the difference between the trial and the lynching is more formal than factual” (Dollard 325), as Tom soon learns. In the end, guilt or innocence does not really matter to the white caste “since the warning is even more clear when it [the jury] hangs the wrong one; i.e., the Negro caste is punished through one of its representatives” (Dollard 358). “Every Negro in the South knows that he is under a kind of sentence of death” (Dollard 359). All a white woman like Mayella Ewell has to do is yell “rape” and a black man like Tom is as good as dead.

Both authors offer their books as cultural critiques of southern race relations but the different approaches create different levels of critique. Dollard participated in what Marcus and Fischer call the “documentary cultural criticism” of the 1930s, working to inform the American public of real social problems in the hopes of finding solutions to those problems. Marcus and Fischer recognize the importance of this type of cultural criticism but also chastize it for assuming that such documentation can readily capture reality. But Marcus and Fischer ignore Dollard who was truly experimenting with the scientific form “as part of the exploratory work of science, of the fumbling and fiddling out of which more authoritative descriptions of reality will emerge” (xii). But, unlike post‑modernists, he believed scientific descriptions of society essential for improving “its disastrous imperfections.”

Long before post‑modernists began experimenting with such techniques, Dollard was incorporating his personal field experiences into his ethnographic narrative and experimenting with the use of the first person singular, which he used reluctantly but with the hope that it would show “the researcher as separated from his data” and “give the reader a more vivid sense of the research experience” (2n). He wished to make clear to the reader the problem of observer bias, in this case his own Northern white bias which he discovered early in his field work. Dollard had gone down South with the expectation that the South was simply an uneducated version of the greater American culture. ³ However, Dollard soon realized that he became so uncertain as to what was biased and what was objective that he decided it was necessary to incorporate his own experience in discovering that bias within the ethnography in order to let the reader understand better the difficulties.

Unlike the ethnographer who has to worry about meeting standard of scientific observation, the novelist really has no absolute standards to meet other than to make the reader think or feel something. To Kill a Mockingbird falls into the genre of autobiographical novel, clearly reflecting Harper Lee’s personal reminiscences of her childhood days. Maycomb, Alabama undoubtedly looks a lot like Monroeville, Alabama, where Lee was born and raised. But being free of the strictures of social science and eschewing the genre of the autobiography, she gains the advantage of being able to manipulate or create people and events in order to tell a more powerful story. Perhaps there was no rape trial or person named Boo Radley in Monroeville. But Lee does her best, through the thorough use of local detail, to make the reader feel that these people, this place, did exist, and this makes her story that much stronger.

Both books teach the lesson that things change slowly. Like many of the 1930s critics, Dollard fits into the functionalist school of Malinowski and Radcliffe‑Brown that saw society as an organic whole or set of interlinked institutions which made directed change very difficult. He stresses historical, psychological, and cultural roots of “the color problem” rather than inherent capitalist economics like Marxists. Dollard carefully suggests that “the evolutionary change which can now occur, and be furthered by human resolution, is to move larger and larger numbers of Negroes into the middle class of their caste,” (xiv) through orderly government promotion of economic, legal, and especially eduational adjustments. But Dollard acknowledges that the “central government cannot mobilize sufficient systematic ruthlessness to interfere seriously with local custom” (358).

Lee offers no corrective other than greater understanding, as when Scout, through her naive wisdom, reminds Mr. Cunningham and the lynch mob that we are all people in the same boat. To Atticus, that the jury deliberates a few hours longer than expected represents some success even if the verdict does not change. But overall the novel may work better as cultural criticism in reaching a wider audience, reflecting the more subtle insider criticism of a Southerner, and using the skills of a good novelist to involve the reader emotionally in the characters. The use of a child’s perspective makes a brilliant device for questioning why society has to be the way it is, forcing people to reflect on where they went “wrong.” (Unfortunately, the only answer offered is that they just grew up.)

Overall the books complement each other quite well. Through all of the differences in methodology, emphasis, and perspective, the reader can easily imagine that the writers are describing the same place. As both individual works and as representatives of genres, these two works show the strength of combining multiple approaches to the study of community. One teacher might use the novel to interest students in the study of the roots of racial problems in this country which might then lead to further study in Dollard and other related works. An English teacher might find Dollard’s more structured community analysis helpful in giving students a sense of the parts of the community that Lee leaves out. An even greater understanding of 20th century Southern society might come by combining other ethnogrpahies like Deep South and novels like The Color Purple as well as the works of rural sociologists, historians, and other disciplines. Only by breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries will students of society begin to understand the complexity of the human condition.